Oh yeah, I call myself a social media maven.  Here’s my latest adventure into the land of social media, involving a webinar, a wiki and a wish.

I’m a charter member of the Online Marketing Advisory Council, started by my good friend Aaron Kahlow. Our mission is to bring together the very best minds in online marketing to contribute news, ideas, strategies, commentary, insights, research and much more. 

The Webinar.

Our first Online Marketing Advisory Council event was a webinar “Town Hall Meeting.” The webinar instructions were easy enough, “click on the link” in order to download the webinar software. Already, I’m thinking, “oh no, I’m going to get the infamous VISTA warnings about the terrible things that will happen to my computer if I continue with the download.”  After being pleasantly surprised that no warning messages appeared, I was able to easily download the software (Go To Webinar offered by Citrix Online).  I’ll definitely keep this software in mind, next time I need to schedule a webinar.

The instructions also say that “you’ll be connected to the audio portion of the webinar using VOIP.” Uh, oh, what the heck is VOIP? I decide to keep it simple and just dial in using my phone.  Of course, this entire process took me about 15 minutes to do, so I’m not feeling too confident about being able to contribute much.

(For the record, a webinar is an online seminar that may contain both audio and video, it’s a great way to run a meeting for folks in different locations.  VOIP means: voice over Internet protocol, or the transmission of your voice over the Internet rather than over phone lines.)

The Wiki.

On to the wiki. A wiki, according to Wikipedia, is:

“a collection of web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites.”

We’re going to use wikis to create online marketing resources. Aaron briefly goes through how the wiki works. This sounds easy enough, it’s kind of like a community Word document. I can handle that. I use Word all the time and of course, I’m quite familiar with all the edit commands.

I go to our wiki website and I don’t see anything titled, “wiki.” Oh boy, not an auspicious start to my first wiki attempt. I manage to create an account, I’m first asked to supply my birthday? What? I won’t even divulge my actual birth year to most of my friends. I’m assuming this question is in here to make sure users are over 18.

Aaron has set up a practice area so we all can get comfortable using a wiki. As I look at what other team members have put up, I’m completely intimidated. Some have put up creative little poems and others have written some detailed suggestions. Me, I can’t even figure out how to add something to the practice section! Finally, I click on the little button that says “easy edit” and an edit tool bar appears. Now what? I type in some text, hit save and the edit tool bar disappears. I’m now debating whether I should ask how to make the edit tool bar stay visible, but I’m afraid there’s a really simple way to do that and I’ll look like a complete dork.

Enough for today.

The Wish.

I finally decide to pose my question about the Tool Bar edit on the forum and almost immediately, another person comments that they, too, were wondering about that. The moderator answers, saying that this is indeed an issue and he’ll bring it up with the software company. So, all in all, I’m glad I brought it up.

I really liked the idea of the practice wiki. It truly is intuitive and it was good to practice before going into the ‘real’ wiki.

I am really looking forward to this project. My wish is that not only can I contribute to the knowledge base, but that I’ll learn a lot from my peers around the country. Stay tuned.

Webinars and wikis are fun and fairly easy tools to help with collaboration, which is what social media is all about.  The best way to learn and become comfortable with them is to just dive and start using them! Have fun!

Nancy Loderick